In this post for the Internet Society Rough Guide to IETF 99, I’m reviewing what’ll be happening at IETF 99 in Prague next week.
IPv6 global adoption rates have seen another 25% increase since the start of 2017, taking them to close to 20% overall with Belgium leading the way at close to 50%. This is attributable to more ISPs and mobile operators rolling out IPv6 as pools of IPv4 addresses approach depletion, that has kept the cost of IPv4 addresses on the brokerage market fairly static, although these costs are still expected to rise over the next couple of years. With many of the major content and cloud providers now supporting IPv6, and substantial interest in home networking, remote sensing/controllers, and vehicular networks, IPv6 looms large in the standardisation work at the IETF, which is also encouraging the use of IPv6 examples in all of its documentation.
The IPv6 Maintenance (6man) Working Group meets first thing on Monday and the big development is the move of the IPv6 specification to Internet Standard Status. It may come as a surprise to many that despite being widely deployed, IPv6 as defined in RFC 2460 has remained a ‘Draft Standard’ since its original publication in 1998.
There are also two working group drafts on updating the IPv6 Addressing Architecture as currently defined in RFC 4291 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-6man-rfc4291bis), and on IPv6 Node Requirements as currently defined in RFC 6434 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-6man-rfc6434-bis). Other existing drafts up for discussion include recommendations on IPv6 address usage (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-gont-6man-address-usage-recommendations) and on Route Information Options in Redirect Messages (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-templin-6man-rio-redirect).
There are also three new drafts being proposed, including one that covers scenarios when IPv6 hosts might not be able to properly detect that a network has changed IPv6 addressing and proposes changes to the Default Address Selection algorithm defined in RFC6724 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-linkova-6man-default-addr-selection-update-00); another that proposes a mechanism for IPv6 hosts to retrieve additional information about network access through multiple interfaces (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-bruneau-intarea-provisioning-domains-01); whilst the remaining draft defines something called an AERO address for use by mobile networks with a tethered network of IoT devices requiring a unique link-local address after receiving a delegated prefix (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-templin-6man-aeroaddr-00).
The Homenet (homenet) Working Group develops protocols for residential networks based on IPv6 and is therefore one of the most active groups at the moment. This will meet on Monday afternoon, and will continue to discuss updated drafts related to a name resolution and service discovery architecture for homenets (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-tldm-simple-homenet-naming-02); how the Babel routing protocol can be used in conjunction with the HNCP protocol in a Homenet scenario (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-homenet-babel-profile-02), and the use of .homenet as a special use top-level domain to replace .home (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-homenet-dot-09). Three new drafts relate to the service discovery and registration aspects of Homenet (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-sctl-service-registration-00, https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-sctl-discovery-broker-00, https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-sctl-dnssd-mdns-relay-00).
Running in parallel is the IPv6 over the TSCH mode of IEEE 802.15.4e (6TiSCH) Working Group. TSCH is the emerging standard for automation and control over low-power and lossy wireless networks, and this group is working on how to utilise IPv6 in industrial standards. At this meeting there will be summaries of the 1st F-Interop 6TiSCH Interoperability Event and OpenWSN Hackathon, followed by discussions on the updated drafts related to the 6top protocol that enables distributed scheduling (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-6tisch-6top-protocol-09 and https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-6tisch-6top-sf0-05), as well as a draft related to security functionality (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-6tisch-minimal-security-03).
Tuesday kicks off with a very busy IPv6 Operations (v6ops) Working Group, which continues on Thursday afternoon. There’s a couple of deployment case studies up first – on turning IPv4 off in the Microsoft enterprise network, followed by some experiences of using dual-stacked websites with Happy Eyeballs. Co-Chair Lee Howard will then discuss the current status of IPv6 deployment.
There are ten drafts being discussed, including requirements for IPv6 routers that aims to document a set of IPv6 requirements for routers, switches and middle boxes based on design and architectural experiences (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-v6ops-ipv6rtr-reqs-00); specifying requirements for zero-configuration IPv6 CPEs (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-baker-v6ops-cpe-autoconfigure-00); and using conditional router advertisements for connecting an enterprise network to multiple ISPs using address space assigned by an ISP (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-linkova-v6ops-conditional-ras-01). Version 2 of Happy Eyeballs is also being proposed, tweaking the algorithm whereby a dual-stack host tries to establish connections with both IPv4 and IPv6 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-v6ops-rfc6555bis-02); and there’s an interesting draft proposing deployment of IPv6-only Wi-Fi at IETF meetings.
The remaining four drafts are proposed updates to RFC 7084 that outlines basic requirements for IPv6 Customer Edge Routers (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-v6ops-rfc7084-bis). As well as updating the basic requirements for routers with HNCP (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-palet-v6ops-rfc7084-bis4-hncp), the other drafts specify both minimum (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-palet-v6ops-rfc7084-bis2) and transitional requirements (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-palet-v6ops-rfc7084-bis2).
The Thing-to-Thing (T2TRG) Working Group on Tuesday afternoon is taking the opportunity to review the outcome of the Workshop on IoT Semantic/Hypermedia Interoperability (WISHI), and discuss what its future activities and deliverables should be.
Then there’s the IPv6 over Networks of Resource Constrained Nodes (6lo) Working Group on Tuesday evening. 6lo focuses on facilitating IPv6 connectivity over node networks with limited power, memory and processing resources. The agenda has yet to be published, but the group has recently been working on Neighbour Discovery, IPv6 over low-power Bluetooth mesh networks, and transmission of IPv6 over electrical power lines, amongst other issues.
The remainder of the week is a bit quieter, although the Distributed Mobility Management (dmm) Working Group on Wednesday morning will be discussing at least one IPv6-relevant draft on the Applicability of the Segment Routing IPv6 to the user-plane of mobile networks. The Dynamic Host Configuration (dhc) Working Group in the afternoon will continue to discuss four DHCPv6 related drafts, as well as hear about the DHCPv6 deployment experiences at Comcast.
The new IP Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (ipwave) Working Group will also be meeting on Thursday afternoon, and whilst has yet to publish its agenda, is working on a specification for transmitting IPv6 datagrams over IEEE 802.11-OCB in Vehicle-to-Internet and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure communications.
Rounding off the week is the IPv6 over Low Power Wide-Area Networks (lpwan) Working Group on Friday morning that’s working on enabling IPv6 connectivity with very low wireless transmission rates between battery-powered devices spread across multiple kilometres. This will be discussing five drafts related to IPv6 header fragmentation and compression, as well as ICMPv6 usage over LPWANs.
At the Internet Society, we continue to promote IPv6 deployment. You can check out the World IPv6 Launch measurements for our latest measurements of IPv6 around the globe: http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements
You can also check out the Deploy360 online resources for getting started with IPv6 deployment:
• http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/start/
• http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/ipv6/
And you can read more about other topics of interest to the technology programs of the Internet Society in the rest of our Rough Guide to IETF 99 posts.
IPv6-related Working Groups at IETF 99:
6MAN (IPv6 Maintenance ) WG
Monday, 17 July 2017 0930-1200 UTC+2, Grand Hilton Ballroom
Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/6man/documents/
Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/6man/charter/
Homenet (Home Networking) WG
Monday, 17 July 2017 1330-1530 UTC+2, Grand Hilton Ballroom
Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/homenet/documents/
Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/homenet/charter/
6TISCH (IPv6 over the TSCH mode of IEEE 802.15.4e)
Monday, 17 July 2017 1330-1530 UTC+2, Karlin I/II
Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/6tisch/documents/
Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-6tisch/
V6OPS (IPv6 Operations) Working Group
Tuesday, 18 July 2017 0930-1200 UTC+2, Congress Hall II &
Thursday, 20 July 2017 1330-1530 UTC+2, Grand Hilton Ballroom
Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/v6ops/documents/
Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-v6ops/
T2TRG (Thing-to-Thing) WG
Tuesday, 18 July 2017 1330-1530 UTC+2, Grand Hilton Ballroom
Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/t2trg/documents/
Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/t2trg/charter/
6LO (IPv6 over Networks of Resource Constrained Nodes) WG
Tuesday, 18 July 2017 1550-1750 UTC+2, Karlin I/II
Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/6lo/documents/
Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-6lo/
DMM (Distributed Mobility Manager) WG
Wednesday, 19 July 2017 0930-1200 UTC+2, Berlin/Brussels
Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/dmm/documents/
Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/dmm/charter/
IPWAVE (IP Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments)
Thursday, 20 July 2017 1550-1750 UTC+2, Athens/Barcelona
Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/ipwave/documents/
Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-ipwave/
LPWAN (IPv6 over Low Power Wide-Area Networks)
Friday, 21 July 2017 0930-1130 UTC+2, Karlin I/II
Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/lpwan/documents/
Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-lpwan/